In My Heart's Core
Aug. 21st, 2012 02:40 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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writerverse challenge 33.
Title: In My Heart's Core
Word Count: 2499
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Hamlet
Pairings (if any): Hamlet/Horatio, Hamlet/Ophelia, Horatio/Ophelia
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc):
Summary: The events surrounding Hamlet's play to catch the conscience of the King from Ophelia and Horatio's perspectives.
Her good Lord Hamlet's mind is overthrown by some malignance more than melancholy. She wonders how in some moments, and in the actions of them, he can be so kind and yet in others so impossibly uncompassionate. How he can be so close with his affections and yet so distant and unkindly in his honour. She questions but does not expect an answer for she asks only herself.
She can hear them. So she listens. The is nothing any more malicious in her eavesdropping than a joint desire not to be seen or assumed to be spying that comeddles so well with her own sharp sting of curiosity that she heeds it and plays the dumb witness from the shadows.
"Give me that man that is not passion's slave-"
Hamlet would not be himself without his passions, Ophelia's mind protests, even if his passions have taken a cruel and fevered turn of late.
"-and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. As I do thee."
As you once did me, she aches to reply, yet reply she cannot for she remembers she is a mere shadow.
"Something too much of this."
Had her mind been unchecked by the conscience of her soul, she would stay a little longer. As it is, Ophelia's body obeys the words never intended for her and she withdraws silently to find another route.
Ophelia has but little time to marvel at the magical transformation of the space about her from dreary, disused hall to a painted orchard. It is home to trees belonging to all seasons. Here is one coloured the pale green and pink of spring, another with the fat, bold, emerald leaves of summer and a third whose leaves are dying in the fiery blaze of autumn.
The fourth tree stands with its branches bare as it braves the winter. She reaches to touch it in a show of comfort. This breaks the illusion, just as she knew it would. The tree is but dead, flat wood with the shape of those noble branches roughly cut. The snow dusting the gaps between those branches is wet still and leaves her fingertips faintly white to mark her curiosity.
There is a final tree resting in the far corner of the hall. It is a willow. Ophelia shuns that tree for someone among the player's company has taken too much care for it to appear as it might in life and she would not see that illusion shattered as she had with the winter tree.
During the play, she shares her glances between the players and her lord. As he lies in her lap and makes bawdy jokes that she feigns ignorance of. She finds herself first amused but quickly waxing frustrated. At times he does seem his old self. He never comes close to the self who wrote the letters and sent her those rememberances but then that was the cautious courtly love maintained in distance by land and sea and kindled to fresh flames by a reunion of those who have not known one another's passions before the parting.
Nothing feels well as the play wears on, for Hamlet's words become too bitter and quick for Ophelia to continue taking them in jest. She tries to calm him, kissing his cheek and declaring him as good as a chorus, though she is nervous that his loud interjections will begin to unsettle the King.
Then he tells her he could narrate the dalliance between her and her love if they were but puppets at play. She fears now that her father will hear and tries to quiet her unruly lord once more. As she looks about them, anxious to ascertain if they are being watched, she sees with shock they are. The man she knows by sight, reputation and her own eavesdropping that as Hamlet's most trusted friend, Horatio, is observing them closely. At the end of a heartwracking second in which they almost but do not quite catch each other's eye, Horatio turns his searching gaze away. He looks not to the players enacting the play Hamlet names the Mousetrap. He looks instead to the King.
"You are keen, my lord," Ophelia tells Hamlet in a most worried whisper, her heart pounding with seeing and being seen in actions one would best be blind to. "You are very keen."
Hamlet catches her about the waist and his head finds a new seat on her shoulder as he
murmurs, "It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge."
Ophelia sighs and speaks almost to herself. She dare not throw him off and risk drawing more attention to them. "Still better, and worse."
"So you must take your husbands!"
Yes, Ophelia thinks, now entirely to herself, so says the marriage vow you would never have me take.
His focus is now back on the players, crying out, "Begin, murderer. Pox, leave thy damnable faces and begin!"
Her thoughts could not be more distant for now, within her mind, she is playing at a happy memory twice two months passed.
It is after the play that Ophelia confronts Horatio. She has seen all the aftermath and heard much of it too and so now she would have answers. She is angry when he does not hear her greeting, for he is still intently watching Hamlet's retreating form on his way to his mother, the Queen. Yet Ophelia is not permitted to show her anger so she hails Horatio again with more volume and bravery to her voice.
"How now, good sir."
He notices her now and turns slowly. She sees he is as surprised to find her talking to him as she is surprised to have struck up this conversation. They have never been formally introduced and this adds a great deal to the spark of uncertainty in the air between them.
"How now, good lady," is all he says as though he is not sure what more he may or even ought to say.
"What is't the Lord Hamlet hath said to you? I saw you talking with such great excitement after the King rose and ceased the play."
"It is nothing, my lady. Words. That is all. The Lord Hamlet knows not what he says."
"Please, sir, I would beg you to be honest."
"You have seen the effect of Lord Hamlet's madness yourself, my dear lady."
Ophelia flinches despite herself. How could he know of the cruel words Hamlet spoke to her in the hall?
Horatio continues and she sees he is truly unaware of the true source of her turmoil tonight and the confusion brewing in her mind, "His importunate speeches towards you at the start of the play, and throughout it, are surely enough to show you he thinks not on his words when his mind leads him to distraction."
She nods, though not at his words but in her own satisfaction and relief in seeing that he did not know aught of the true confrontation that so overwrought her heart still. How her once beloved lord had screamed and bellowed in her face to remove herself at once to the safety of a nunnery. And how then he had pleaded, as if the thought of her remaining out in the world would wound and horrify him more than any of her refusals of his love. She caught with too much ease his intertwined intentions in his advice. Having grown up with only a brother and a father she could not fail to learn those truer meanings that lie under the respected and pious words. Get thee to a nunnery, Ophelia, or else get thee to the whorehouse, for you where you were once fit for the one, you are now seasoned for the other. Get thee to a nunnery. Or else marry a fool.
"Are you a fool, good sir?" she asks the familiar stranger, so trusted by her love.
He does not answer her and yet offers her an almost brotherly embrace in which to hide her tears from the world inside that falsely painted room.
Horatio is seated reading in quiet seclusion halfway down the stairs when Hamlet calls out for him.
"What ho, Horatio!"
"Here, sweet lord, at your service."
Horatio's book and his place in it are quite forgotten as the Prince begins to talk to him in an informal tone, one more at home beside a private fireplace in Wittenberg than between the ever eager and listening walls of the Danish court.
"Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man as e'er my conversation coped withal."
"O, my dear lord-" he begins to protest for he knows, even if he had done anything worthy of Prince Hamlet's praise, he could say with complete certainty that this was neither the time nor the place to receive it.
"Nay, do not think I flatter."
The Prince speaks softly to him as he begins and his speech is laden with such compliments that Horatio can make no reply. Now Hamlet speaks more softly still and with such a measured steadiness that Horatio must take every word as utter and unquestionable honesty.
"Give me that man that is not passion's slave and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. As I do thee."
Horatio feels he even now may break that stoic face that his sweet lord admires so and forget his decorum entirely in the coming moments, yet Hamlet himself brings about a change in subject as rapid as the flight of Mercury's winged sandals and Horatio is bound to listen to his further speech rather than dwell on his own quiet passions.
Hamlet charges him with the task of watching his uncle during the play. Horatio, his heart still silently singing with the unspoken love woken by Hamlet's praise, takes up his task willingly.
Yet he can not help but steal glances at the other pair in spite of his solemn promise to fix his eyes to the King's looks. He sees Hamlet rest his head on Ophelia's lap during the dumb show. That is too intimate a gesture for Horatio to ignore. Hamlet only raises his head to explain the play to Ophelia. Horatio sees Ophelia lay kisses on Hamlet's bare cheek above his beard as she praises him in saying he is as good as a chorus though Horatio had caught her before calling Hamlet's words naught and making it clear she would rather mark the play.
In another of his intermittent glances, Horatio thinks he catches the two talking of love making for Hamlet has his arm about her and a familiar light of passion blazing in his eyes as he speaks to her.
Horatio struggles to remind himself to mark the king for now the dumb show has fled the stage and the true chorus imparted his prologue and the matter of the play is soon to come.
Though he knows from gasps of shock and the narration of Hamlet himself that the Player Nephew has entered and is seeming to apply some potion or poison to the Player King, Horatio does not dare snatch his eyes away from the true King who Hamlet would prove false and a villain for this is the moment the Prince hangs his hopes upon. Horatio will watch the King until Doomsday if he must for he has resolved to do aught that is required of him to collect the evidence his lord needs to prove his ghost honest.
As the moment creeps on, fear crosses the King's features and Horatio notes it. Yet even as he watches he wonders if this is not the fear of his own nephew, dangerous in his distraction, though too that might well be the glint of guilt flashing in the King's eyes before he calls for torches to drown it with a greater light. Hamlet certainly reads it as so as he is manic with his celebration as he runs to Horatio's side even as the others follow the King or depart some other way.
"I did very well note him," Horatio assures him though his intent in warning Hamlet of the other danger he read in the King's face is cut short by the arrival of those two unfortunate fools, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with word from that very King himself.
Hamlet diverts his joyous energies to cajoling this pair. There is a serious air to his words as an urging for one to play on a pipe becomes an exposure of his true displeasure at feeling that they have been playing him like the pipe at which they claim to have no skill. His tone of mood shifts once more as his attentions turn to Polonius. Hamlet assumes the manner of a bumbling and ancient man, using Horatio's proffered spectacles as a prop to complete his illusion. He points with a feebly shaking hand and tremulous voice to an imagined cloud which in quick succession he has Polonius agreeing looks as a camel, weasel and whale.
With that triumph he goes to his mother.
Ophelia comes to the lone Horatio.
She would know what has been said between the Prince and himself. Horatio has to fight to hold his tongue. He knows well of Hamlet's apparent madness and his art at putting it on to display to others as a distraction from his true intent. And yet here is this fair and worrisome maiden asking of him the answers he had sworn never to give to any soul, be they maid or mother, man or King or God Himself.
He must placate her with his words. Yet now he has no words. His words have all been spent in sharing his understanding of all he perceived of Denmark's troubled state from the view of Kings and soldiers and scholars such as himself. Or else he has used them as liberal oinment to the Prince's mad and melancholic moods and in startled replies to his wild and whirling words.
She asks him if he is a fool. In truth he has always been called wise beyond his years, yet he cannot understand her question well enough to answer it. And yet he does well note how as he offers her a small circle of comfort that she accepts with no question of being formal or proper. Horatio thinks on Hamlet and his treasonous task, even as he feels the maid's soft hair, tightly bound up in modest jewels and ivory coloured pearls, stroking softly against his cheek as she shakes with sobs.
"Thy sorrows weigh too much on thee, sweet lady."
"I fear it may be so." She raises her head and breaks the embrace with a step backwards. Her blue eyes so full of water have found his and yet now her words and stance become formal. "I thank you for your comfort. Now I must bid you farewell, good Horatio. My father will be expecting me at home."
writerverse challenge 33.Title: In My Heart's Core
Word Count: 2499
Rating: PG
Original/Fandom: Hamlet
Pairings (if any): Hamlet/Horatio, Hamlet/Ophelia, Horatio/Ophelia
Warnings (Non-Con/Dub-Con/etc):
Summary: The events surrounding Hamlet's play to catch the conscience of the King from Ophelia and Horatio's perspectives.
Her good Lord Hamlet's mind is overthrown by some malignance more than melancholy. She wonders how in some moments, and in the actions of them, he can be so kind and yet in others so impossibly uncompassionate. How he can be so close with his affections and yet so distant and unkindly in his honour. She questions but does not expect an answer for she asks only herself.
She can hear them. So she listens. The is nothing any more malicious in her eavesdropping than a joint desire not to be seen or assumed to be spying that comeddles so well with her own sharp sting of curiosity that she heeds it and plays the dumb witness from the shadows.
"Give me that man that is not passion's slave-"
Hamlet would not be himself without his passions, Ophelia's mind protests, even if his passions have taken a cruel and fevered turn of late.
"-and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. As I do thee."
As you once did me, she aches to reply, yet reply she cannot for she remembers she is a mere shadow.
"Something too much of this."
Had her mind been unchecked by the conscience of her soul, she would stay a little longer. As it is, Ophelia's body obeys the words never intended for her and she withdraws silently to find another route.
Ophelia has but little time to marvel at the magical transformation of the space about her from dreary, disused hall to a painted orchard. It is home to trees belonging to all seasons. Here is one coloured the pale green and pink of spring, another with the fat, bold, emerald leaves of summer and a third whose leaves are dying in the fiery blaze of autumn.
The fourth tree stands with its branches bare as it braves the winter. She reaches to touch it in a show of comfort. This breaks the illusion, just as she knew it would. The tree is but dead, flat wood with the shape of those noble branches roughly cut. The snow dusting the gaps between those branches is wet still and leaves her fingertips faintly white to mark her curiosity.
There is a final tree resting in the far corner of the hall. It is a willow. Ophelia shuns that tree for someone among the player's company has taken too much care for it to appear as it might in life and she would not see that illusion shattered as she had with the winter tree.
During the play, she shares her glances between the players and her lord. As he lies in her lap and makes bawdy jokes that she feigns ignorance of. She finds herself first amused but quickly waxing frustrated. At times he does seem his old self. He never comes close to the self who wrote the letters and sent her those rememberances but then that was the cautious courtly love maintained in distance by land and sea and kindled to fresh flames by a reunion of those who have not known one another's passions before the parting.
Nothing feels well as the play wears on, for Hamlet's words become too bitter and quick for Ophelia to continue taking them in jest. She tries to calm him, kissing his cheek and declaring him as good as a chorus, though she is nervous that his loud interjections will begin to unsettle the King.
Then he tells her he could narrate the dalliance between her and her love if they were but puppets at play. She fears now that her father will hear and tries to quiet her unruly lord once more. As she looks about them, anxious to ascertain if they are being watched, she sees with shock they are. The man she knows by sight, reputation and her own eavesdropping that as Hamlet's most trusted friend, Horatio, is observing them closely. At the end of a heartwracking second in which they almost but do not quite catch each other's eye, Horatio turns his searching gaze away. He looks not to the players enacting the play Hamlet names the Mousetrap. He looks instead to the King.
"You are keen, my lord," Ophelia tells Hamlet in a most worried whisper, her heart pounding with seeing and being seen in actions one would best be blind to. "You are very keen."
Hamlet catches her about the waist and his head finds a new seat on her shoulder as he
murmurs, "It would cost you a groaning to take off mine edge."
Ophelia sighs and speaks almost to herself. She dare not throw him off and risk drawing more attention to them. "Still better, and worse."
"So you must take your husbands!"
Yes, Ophelia thinks, now entirely to herself, so says the marriage vow you would never have me take.
His focus is now back on the players, crying out, "Begin, murderer. Pox, leave thy damnable faces and begin!"
Her thoughts could not be more distant for now, within her mind, she is playing at a happy memory twice two months passed.
It is after the play that Ophelia confronts Horatio. She has seen all the aftermath and heard much of it too and so now she would have answers. She is angry when he does not hear her greeting, for he is still intently watching Hamlet's retreating form on his way to his mother, the Queen. Yet Ophelia is not permitted to show her anger so she hails Horatio again with more volume and bravery to her voice.
"How now, good sir."
He notices her now and turns slowly. She sees he is as surprised to find her talking to him as she is surprised to have struck up this conversation. They have never been formally introduced and this adds a great deal to the spark of uncertainty in the air between them.
"How now, good lady," is all he says as though he is not sure what more he may or even ought to say.
"What is't the Lord Hamlet hath said to you? I saw you talking with such great excitement after the King rose and ceased the play."
"It is nothing, my lady. Words. That is all. The Lord Hamlet knows not what he says."
"Please, sir, I would beg you to be honest."
"You have seen the effect of Lord Hamlet's madness yourself, my dear lady."
Ophelia flinches despite herself. How could he know of the cruel words Hamlet spoke to her in the hall?
Horatio continues and she sees he is truly unaware of the true source of her turmoil tonight and the confusion brewing in her mind, "His importunate speeches towards you at the start of the play, and throughout it, are surely enough to show you he thinks not on his words when his mind leads him to distraction."
She nods, though not at his words but in her own satisfaction and relief in seeing that he did not know aught of the true confrontation that so overwrought her heart still. How her once beloved lord had screamed and bellowed in her face to remove herself at once to the safety of a nunnery. And how then he had pleaded, as if the thought of her remaining out in the world would wound and horrify him more than any of her refusals of his love. She caught with too much ease his intertwined intentions in his advice. Having grown up with only a brother and a father she could not fail to learn those truer meanings that lie under the respected and pious words. Get thee to a nunnery, Ophelia, or else get thee to the whorehouse, for you where you were once fit for the one, you are now seasoned for the other. Get thee to a nunnery. Or else marry a fool.
"Are you a fool, good sir?" she asks the familiar stranger, so trusted by her love.
He does not answer her and yet offers her an almost brotherly embrace in which to hide her tears from the world inside that falsely painted room.
Horatio is seated reading in quiet seclusion halfway down the stairs when Hamlet calls out for him.
"What ho, Horatio!"
"Here, sweet lord, at your service."
Horatio's book and his place in it are quite forgotten as the Prince begins to talk to him in an informal tone, one more at home beside a private fireplace in Wittenberg than between the ever eager and listening walls of the Danish court.
"Horatio, thou art e'en as just a man as e'er my conversation coped withal."
"O, my dear lord-" he begins to protest for he knows, even if he had done anything worthy of Prince Hamlet's praise, he could say with complete certainty that this was neither the time nor the place to receive it.
"Nay, do not think I flatter."
The Prince speaks softly to him as he begins and his speech is laden with such compliments that Horatio can make no reply. Now Hamlet speaks more softly still and with such a measured steadiness that Horatio must take every word as utter and unquestionable honesty.
"Give me that man that is not passion's slave and I will wear him in my heart's core, ay, in my heart of heart. As I do thee."
Horatio feels he even now may break that stoic face that his sweet lord admires so and forget his decorum entirely in the coming moments, yet Hamlet himself brings about a change in subject as rapid as the flight of Mercury's winged sandals and Horatio is bound to listen to his further speech rather than dwell on his own quiet passions.
Hamlet charges him with the task of watching his uncle during the play. Horatio, his heart still silently singing with the unspoken love woken by Hamlet's praise, takes up his task willingly.
Yet he can not help but steal glances at the other pair in spite of his solemn promise to fix his eyes to the King's looks. He sees Hamlet rest his head on Ophelia's lap during the dumb show. That is too intimate a gesture for Horatio to ignore. Hamlet only raises his head to explain the play to Ophelia. Horatio sees Ophelia lay kisses on Hamlet's bare cheek above his beard as she praises him in saying he is as good as a chorus though Horatio had caught her before calling Hamlet's words naught and making it clear she would rather mark the play.
In another of his intermittent glances, Horatio thinks he catches the two talking of love making for Hamlet has his arm about her and a familiar light of passion blazing in his eyes as he speaks to her.
Horatio struggles to remind himself to mark the king for now the dumb show has fled the stage and the true chorus imparted his prologue and the matter of the play is soon to come.
Though he knows from gasps of shock and the narration of Hamlet himself that the Player Nephew has entered and is seeming to apply some potion or poison to the Player King, Horatio does not dare snatch his eyes away from the true King who Hamlet would prove false and a villain for this is the moment the Prince hangs his hopes upon. Horatio will watch the King until Doomsday if he must for he has resolved to do aught that is required of him to collect the evidence his lord needs to prove his ghost honest.
As the moment creeps on, fear crosses the King's features and Horatio notes it. Yet even as he watches he wonders if this is not the fear of his own nephew, dangerous in his distraction, though too that might well be the glint of guilt flashing in the King's eyes before he calls for torches to drown it with a greater light. Hamlet certainly reads it as so as he is manic with his celebration as he runs to Horatio's side even as the others follow the King or depart some other way.
"I did very well note him," Horatio assures him though his intent in warning Hamlet of the other danger he read in the King's face is cut short by the arrival of those two unfortunate fools, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, with word from that very King himself.
Hamlet diverts his joyous energies to cajoling this pair. There is a serious air to his words as an urging for one to play on a pipe becomes an exposure of his true displeasure at feeling that they have been playing him like the pipe at which they claim to have no skill. His tone of mood shifts once more as his attentions turn to Polonius. Hamlet assumes the manner of a bumbling and ancient man, using Horatio's proffered spectacles as a prop to complete his illusion. He points with a feebly shaking hand and tremulous voice to an imagined cloud which in quick succession he has Polonius agreeing looks as a camel, weasel and whale.
With that triumph he goes to his mother.
Ophelia comes to the lone Horatio.
She would know what has been said between the Prince and himself. Horatio has to fight to hold his tongue. He knows well of Hamlet's apparent madness and his art at putting it on to display to others as a distraction from his true intent. And yet here is this fair and worrisome maiden asking of him the answers he had sworn never to give to any soul, be they maid or mother, man or King or God Himself.
He must placate her with his words. Yet now he has no words. His words have all been spent in sharing his understanding of all he perceived of Denmark's troubled state from the view of Kings and soldiers and scholars such as himself. Or else he has used them as liberal oinment to the Prince's mad and melancholic moods and in startled replies to his wild and whirling words.
She asks him if he is a fool. In truth he has always been called wise beyond his years, yet he cannot understand her question well enough to answer it. And yet he does well note how as he offers her a small circle of comfort that she accepts with no question of being formal or proper. Horatio thinks on Hamlet and his treasonous task, even as he feels the maid's soft hair, tightly bound up in modest jewels and ivory coloured pearls, stroking softly against his cheek as she shakes with sobs.
"Thy sorrows weigh too much on thee, sweet lady."
"I fear it may be so." She raises her head and breaks the embrace with a step backwards. Her blue eyes so full of water have found his and yet now her words and stance become formal. "I thank you for your comfort. Now I must bid you farewell, good Horatio. My father will be expecting me at home."
